The e-commerce sector in India has witnessed a significant scale over the past few years, particularly during the festive season annually on the back of a vast digitized population and new internet users in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Amazon India’s Great Indian Festival marks the largest annual sale by the company providing an opportunity for sellers to cover the pan-India market and cutting down geographical barriers.
During the previous festive sale, more than 35,000 sellers recorded their highest-ever single-day sales while 650 sellers recorded sales in crores and 23,000 sellers registered sales in lakhs, according to Amazon India. In a conversation with FE Aspire, Gaurav Bhatnagar, Head of Seller Acquisition and Development at Amazon India, talked about the upcoming festive season and the opportunity for its sellers, part of its grand India vision. Below are the edited excerpts:
Q) How does Amazon see the future of small sellers on the platform?
If you see our journey in India over the last decade, one of the key things we have looked at is how we can support MSMEs in the country and help them in their economic development. The MSME sector today contributes a one-third share of the gross domestic product (GDP) of India. As we endeavour towards the $5 trillion economy, the MSME sector will play a pivotal role and their growth is crucial for India.
In that endeavour, we had rolled out three pledges, first, digitize over 10 million MSMEs by 2025; second, create 2 million jobs in the country and third, enable exports worth $20 billion. We are doing well on that journey in terms of getting towards the commitment. So for example, we have already digitised 6.2 million MSMEs and enabled 1.3 million jobs. From the export perspective, we are already at cumulative exports of $8 billion from India. So we’re on track to achieve the pledges.
Q) What support Amazon India is extending to sellers, particularly to benefit from the festive season?
During the festive season, a lot of new businesses join us. For them, we have rolled out a couple of initiatives such as first, a 50 per cent referral fee waiver to support ‘new to e-commerce businesses’ during this festive season. All new sellers registering on Amazon.in between August 27 and November 4, 2023, will be eligible for a 50 per cent waiver on referral fees for a period of 60 days.
Secondly, from the technical front, we have launched a Self Service Registration (SSR) 2.0 which makes it easy for sellers to register on the marketplace, list their products, and start selling on Amazon. Sellers have to register with their mobile number and GST. Since a large number of sellers run their businesses by mobile phone, SSR 2.0 is accessible by mobile phones.
Third is our new product feature called Sale Event. It is a planner that allows MSMEs to configure by themselves any special offer that they want to provide for their customers on any of their products. Also, the planner provides for inventory planning in terms of what could be the potential inventory that the selling partner could potentially ensure that will help them get better sales during the festive season.
How does Amazon India support small businesses in imaging, logistics, and more?
We have a network of third-party service providers, who do everything from imaging, data logging, to temporary GST certificates to logistics. There are more than 1200 such vendors listed on the Amazon service provider network providing pre-negotiated rates better than the market.
How do you see the global demand for Indian SME products during the festive season?
Ans) Since we are targeting $20 billion in e-commerce exports from our platform by 2025, our sellers do not just get a domestic market but 18 different marketplaces to sell their products worldwide. A vast Indian diaspora celebrates the festival, and the demand is global. Hence, it is a great time to do business.